From Flowers to Food-The Thais Do It Right

Hello from Bangkok!  Today I ran around the park by our hotel enjoying the palm trees and several different colors of bougainvillea surrounding a huge pond.  Thought why not start the hot sweaty day with a good sweat!  After cooling off in the pool, Julia and I were ready to hit the flower market. I've never seen so many gorgeous flowers in one place.  Bunches and bunches of roses, stacks and stacks of orchids-you name the flower, we saw it in the hundreds!  It was so beautiful and very cool to see the Thai people stringing these flowers into what appeared to be special adornments for the several temples scattered throughout the city.

We had fruit sprinkled with salt, sugar and ground chilli for breakfast (I favor the "sapparot" which is pineapple-Julia has been digging the different varieties of mango); and we found a sweet cart man making kaafae thung (coffee made by pouring hot water through a bag of coffee grounds then topped off with sugar, ice, and sweetened condensed milk)-good stuff!  We stumbled upon Wat Pho and appreciated the temple's gold mirrored exterior with touches of bright greens, reds and purples with elephants and other elevated figures seen mixed within.  Experienced our first "squatter" for a bathroom here which was interesting. We were able to peek inside the courtyard area where monks young and old were busy with some project that included using a wheel barrel that was also quite interesting.  The temple grounds were much calmer than the craziness we had experienced all morning and you heard birds chirping and saw butterflies fluttering about the surrounding trees. I also really enjoyed the huge water filled pots that surround the temples with blooming lily pads-and yes, lily pad blooms were also for sale at the flower market.

We walked down the street and sat outside a little restaurant to enjoy our first Thai hot and tangy salad. These salads are called "Yam" and apparently are the spiciest of all the Thai dishes-I agree!  My mouth burned for a good hour after the delicious meal!  It's a concoction made with lime, chillies, herbs, vegetables (lettuce, tomatoe and onion) mixed with your choice of meat.  I had the pork, Julia-egg-salad with fried egg-why not!?

We next found ourselves sitting on the terrace of the fancy schmancy Penninsula Hotel watching the long boats speed by. Enjoyed a cocktail and then made our way to Lumpini park which is Bangkok's version of NYC's Central Park. Everything was so green and lush...and we, of course, continued to be hot and sweaty.  People weren't kidding when they spoke of the heat and humidity here. It's like nothing I've ever experienced, and just a part of this tropical place that enables all of these happy beautiful plants to thrive.

On home to our hotel-currently wiped out, but may venture out for some more "phat thai" that I had last night close to our hotel on a popular bustling street called the Sukhumvit.  The food so far has definitely been delicious. We've tried some fun street foods, at times really not knowing exactly what we are eating, and I had the best green chicken curry yesterday.  This is basically going to be my travel journal, so I will also give a shout out to the fried chicken and pork w/ chillies consumed yesterday, too.  What really impressed upon me today was the abundance of fresh flowers for sale along with the endless street meat seen, and again, the friendliness of these people...maybe because they take the time to stop and smell the roses and keep their bellies full-sounds good to me!